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Challenge

Finding highly-skilled and available IT developers at the right time is a challenge that every technology company is facing. Our collaboration with Maistro started in November 2015 when a temporary CTO of Maistro made the decision to work with a Lithuanian IT company. We took the challenge to find and create a dedicated team of developers for Blur Group.

Information leading to solution

Just a few small and medium-sized technology companies in the United Kingdom are informed about the opportunities in the Baltic countries. Lithuania is located perfectly – at the heart of Europe with world-class ICT infrastructure and a quickly expanding, highly qualified talent pool. Besides the fastest broadband Internet connection, Lithuania has the biggest technology university in the Baltics, with the best-awarded IT students worldwide.

Technology shared service centers such as Barclays and much more are rapidly expanding and investing in Lithuania. As they have huge business centers here, there is neither more space nor opportunities for small-sized companies from the UK. After some consultations, Maistro took a strategic decision to cooperate with us and apparently they did not regret ever since.

Process and Communication

1st step: We started a recruitment process in Lithuania and searched for senior developers.2nd step: Together with a team in the UK we considered each candidate and selected them according to our shared opinions.3rd step: When a developer was selected, we sent him off for 1 to 2 weeks to the UK to kick off the project.4th step: Each step was repeated till the whole team was created.

At this time the Tech team lead works in the UK and has 1 developer by his side. And our dedicated team has 2 back-end Symfony and PHP developers and 2 front-end JavaScript AngularJS developers.

At the beginning, we had weekly meetings with the CTO of Maistro to let him watch the process of project implementation and track the flow. After 3 weeks, the CTO decided that there is no need for him to track the project anymore. He was satisfied with the results and left all the tracking for the Tech team lead. During 1 week, our dedicated team in Lithuania proved the promised efficiency: we implemented 50% more tasks than we had planned.

Communication between developers and the Tech team lead is organized according to a scrum project management method. Every morning starts with the daily stand-ups: each developer shares what he implemented yesterday, what are his plans for today and what obstacles he is facing at that moment. Using such tools as GIT, Jira, Docker, Slack we ensure the quality of project implementation process.

Planning is the key

Our solution to time difference is planning. We plan all the implementations of each project in sprints. During the phase of planning, we communicate a lot with clients, we answer and give all the questions before the sprint. And, during the sprint, we easily implement all the solutions we planned.